Operational policies for the management of critical resources in production facilities

Effective bottleneck management is a well-known and widely accepted practice in the operations and production management literature. It recognizes that the throughput of a line is strongly affected by the way operations are managed at the bottleneck. In this paper we review an approach which attempts to minimize the probability of starvation at critical resources. The contribution stands in an analytical approach to determine the amount of safety inventory to be held in the line to account for variability in the manufacturing lead time.